Spheres of Action: Speech and Performance in Romantic Culture by Alexander Dick, Angela Esterhammer (review)

612 BOOK REVIEWS Alexander Dick and Angela Esterhammer, eds. Spheres ofAction: Speech and Performance in Romantic Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Pp. 306. $65. This lively and varied collection of essays sets itself the task of “liberating the tongue of Romanticism,” a project that seeks to drive another stake through the heart of the so-called “Romantic ideology” that privileges mind over matter, thought over action, and the private over the public realm. In fact, as the volume’s subtitle indicates, the interests of the con­ tributors range much more widely than the recovery of the spoken voice, opening onto a broader field of performance that encompasses theatrical, parliamentary, legal, and sporting contexts. Studying performance in any of these arenas at the remove of two hundred years clearly poses formidable methodological problems, which some ofthe contributors make a main fo­ cus oftheir essays. All are interested in the potential offered by the category of the performative to reassert the importance ofsubjectivity and moral re­ sponsibility, and to rebalance the material and the abstract, in Romantic studies: individual bodies perform consequential acts in real situations, after all, but they do so within limits and constraints, whether those take the form ofphysical spaces, institutional codes, or ideological pressures. In their various efforts to grasp or probe the limits of human action, Dick and Esterhammer argue in their introduction, the Romantics anticipated the distinctly postmodern preoccupation with “the tension between the sover­ eign subject’s fantasy of agency and the power diffused within social dis­ course.” To some extent, therefore, the editors share the desire implicit in several recent studies to emphasize not so much the historical difference of Romantic culture, as its uncanny similarity to the way we live, think, and communicate now. The essays in Spheres ofAction are divided into two sections, on “Public Speaking” and “Body Language,” an unstable binary, as the editors admit, and one that gives only a loose idea of the actual content of the individual pieces. The volume begins strongly with Judith Thompson’s essay on “John Thelwall and the Science and Practice of Elocution.” I am not sure that I wholly agree with Thompson’s view ofthe “bias against speech” that she attributes to both Romantic writers and their modern critics: Words­ worth, after all, characterized the poet as a “man speaking to men,” and Shelley defined poetry as harmonious sounds echoing an eternal music, and critics have not been backward in dissecting this poetics of orality/aurality. Nevertheless, Thompson sheds fascinating light on the interplay between Thelwall’s thirty years’ work as an elocutionist and speech therapist and his literary and political activities. In the absence of transcripts ofhis elocution­ ary lectures, she focuses on his 1794 lecture on spies and informers (aspects SiR, 51 (Winter 2012) BOOK REVIEWS 613 of the delivery ofwhich are signified in transcription by different fonts and so forth), which she interprets not as flashy demagoguery but as a sophisti­ cated performance aimed at persuading his audience to see themselves as more than a passive rabble. Just as Thelwall’s physiological understanding of speech and speech defects emphasized the importance of sympathetic cooperation between different parts of the body, so his oratorical technique encouraged listeners to “recognize different parts or movements of their own characters (indignation and steadiness, invective and reason) and to balance them,” thus becoming fitter democratic subjects than their rulingclass oppressors. Whereas Thompson concentrates on delivery, Sarah M. Zimmerman, in “Coleridge the Lecturer, A Disappearing Act,” is more interested in the physical spaces in which Coleridge made his name as a public lecturer. In­ spired by Humphry Davy’s success in shaking offhis early associations with provincial radicalism and establishing himself in London as a professor of chemistry and celebrity speaker, Coleridge too sought to put his radical years in Bristol behind him and reinvent himselfwith his lectures on litera­ ture at the Royal Institution, where the arts were valued alongside science and technology because they helped to attract well-to-do patrons. Cole­ ridge found the beautiful semicircular lecture theater the ideal setting for his new role, his only concern being the possible association of lectures with popular entertainment, an anxiety compounded by...